The first in a three-volume edition of the complete Decca recordings of Sir Adrian Boult, this set represents the most complete survey ever issued of Sir Adrian Boult’s British music recordings for Decca. It includes previously unpublished recordings of Holst and a pioneering cycle of Vaughan Williams. LIMITED EDITION. Boult began recording for Decca in 1950 once he had been forcibly retired by the BBC at the age of 60. The company lost no time in bringing the unrivalled authority of his British music interpretations to the record-buying public. Decca’s engineering team and equipment was widely regarded as the best available at the time, led by the likes of producer John Culshaw and engineer Kenneth Wilkinson, and they captured the spatial aspects and colours of Vaughan Williams the symphonist with unprecedented fidelity at the time. Boult’s later recording of the Ninth and speeches by both Boult and Vaughan Williams have been included. So has Boult’s 1953 recording of incidental music to The Wasps, coupled with the much rarer Old King Cole ballet, and Boult’s second, 1954 version of Job, a work with which he was so closely associated for many years. This collection features a notable first in the Boult discography: four previously unpublished recordings of music by his friend Holst. While recording other English repertoire back in the mono era Boult had attempted to carve out sufficient time in the sessions for a Holst LP which never came to fruition. Four pieces – the Somerset Rhapsody, Marching Song, the Scherzo from an unfinished symphony (all in mono) and Country Song (in stereo) are now published for the first time. Boult also worked extensively with the best young British composers of his day, and this underrated aspect of his conducting is represented in the collection by 1954 mono accounts of Malcolm Arnold’s English Dances and from 1960 the First Symphony of Humphrey Searle – coupled for the first time since its release with two pieces composed and conducted by the Hungarian émigré Mátyás Seiber, as on the original LP.
